When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth

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Bannon, with Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, were among the loudest and most forceful voices in Trump’s ear, imploring the president to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement.

During his speech, Trump claimed the Paris deal was bad for America. The themes were economic, but the speech was laced with jingoistic protectionism.“Our withdrawal represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty,” he said.

But make no mistake here.

The foundation for Trump’s dismissal of the Paris deal – and for the people who pushed him the hardest to do it – is the rejection of the science linking fossil-fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

Or rather, Trump’s rejection of the Paris deal was built on the flimsy, cherry-picked and long-debunked talking points of an industry built to manufacture doubt about climate science. Once you fall for those arguments, making an economic case suddenly feels plausible.

After Trump signed off with his catchphrase pledge glib enough to fit on a baseball cap, he invited Pruitt to say a few words.

Myron Ebell, the man picked by the Trump campaign team to engineer the EPA’s transition from an agency that acknowledges the risk of fossil-fuel burning to one being forced to publicly deny it, is a long-serving member of that climate science denial industry.

Moments after Trump’s announcement, Steve Milloy, one of Ebell’s colleagues in that 1998 campaign who was also drafted by Ebell to help him “transition” the EPA, tweeted: “Congratulations to all climate skeptics! We have reaped a tremendous victory.”

Since then, elements of the fossil-fuel industry have run a relentless campaign of self-interested misinformation that puts the protection of their industry above the protection of communities, habitats and species across the planet.

They got together with so-called “free market” advocates whose view on the world tells them governments have to be small and that regulations are bad.

Just weeks ago, a collective of conservative “free market” organisations wrote an open letter to Trump urging him to cut ties with the Paris deal.

The first name on the letter was Ebell’s. Many signatories reject entirely the role of fossil-fuel burning in changing the climate. Many of the groups those people represent have taken millions of dollars in donations from the petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Those groups are the same ones who have developed talking points, compiled reports, appeared in the media, written newspaper columns, gone on speaking torus, given testimony to congress – all geared to protecting the fossil-fuel industry while relegating, ignoring or misrepresenting the science.

As Rhode Island senator and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse said in the moments after Trump’s announcement, Trump “is betraying the country, in service of Breitbart fake news, the fossil fuel industry, & the Koch brothers’ climate denial operation.”